


Sparkshine

by hellkitty



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-14
Updated: 2016-02-14
Packaged: 2018-05-20 11:58:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6005110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just a little Valentine's Day fluff.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sparkshine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ladyofdragons](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyofdragons/gifts).



“I know it’s symbolism, Drift.” The opticroll really wasn’t necessary, but then again, that was Ratchet. “I’m just saying it’s rather ghastly symbolism. And anatomically incorrect. That’s not what human hearts look like, at all.”

“That’s why it’s symbolism,” Drift said, earnestly. “So it’s less gross.” Because, honestly, he was a little freaked out by the shapes clearly representing Cybertronian spark chambers and that...other thing there with fluttery ribbon tentacles, which he presumed was some….other kind of creature’s interior organ.

“And equating it with a spark chamber?” Ratchet shuddered at the anatomical inaccuracy. “The human heart is a circulation organ. A fuel pump would be a better analogy.”

“Yeah,” Drift admitted. “But you don’t feel things with your fuel pump.”

“Only thing I feel looking at a spark chamber is wondering where the brain module is,” Ratchet said. Which...might have been a metaphor for how he felt about love in general, Drift supposed. But that wasn’t the point right now.

“Symbolism!” Drift protested. “It’s a local festival, not a science fair!” Sometimes, Ratchet really needed to lighten up!

“You keep saying that like it makes it all better.” Ratchet’s mouth pulled down on one side. “You can festival all you want. I’m going to restock the medikit and go back to the ship.”

“But I thought you were the one that wanted to stretch your legs?” That had been what Ratchet had said when they’d spotted the orbital markers

Ratchet stuck on leg out in front of him. “See? Stretched.” He dropped the foot back down. “You get some, I don’t know, festival tchotchkes and meet me back at the ship.”

“Ratch--” but he was already gone. Which was kind of spooky considering he was a medic and not a speedster. Drift huffed a sigh, frustrated. He’d thought getting out of the ship would be fun for both of them. And, you know, maybe another way to caaaaasually stall getting back to the Lost Light and Drift’s uncertain welcome. Even if they did, you know, forgive him for the whole Overlord thing, they’d still remember that the last thing they’d done is throw scrap at him. Yeah. Uncertain and awkward. Whole lotta awkward. He’d rather face the stone giants again.

Right. Well. So here he was, and he was going to prove Ratchet wrong. He was going to find something awesome here that Ratchet missed, and bring it back. Something more than the rock with googly eyes he’d made for the medic after that whole, you know, thing with Gigatron. It wasn’t Drift’s fault that there weren’t a lot of souvenir options there!

But there were here--all kinds of filmy scarves and colored metal chains with dangly pendants and sparkly stuff. Ratchet didn’t seem like a sparkly type of mech, though, Drift thought, putting down the stuff. There were still plenty of booths to explore. He’d find something.

He rounded the corner to the next aisle when a hand darted out, snatching his fingers. A small hand, almost human sized, except that it was bright blue.

“You come.”

“I. Uh.” He tried to disentangle his hand, but it clung tight, attached to a longish, bone thin arm. “Is there something wrong?”

“Something you need hear.”

“Need here? Yeah. I mean, I’m looking for a gift for--”

“Need hear!” The creature tapped its head with another hand. It had...wow. Five hands. That was more than the usual human quota of hands. It tugged at him urgently. “You come now.”

He didn’t have a bad feeling about this whole thing, as he followed the surprisingly swift moving (Or was it? Was it weird to move fast on three feet?) creature through the crowd. The bonus arms did a really impressive job of parting the crowd and--the reformed guttermech in Drift couldn’t help but notice--liberate more than a few of the festival goers of their cred chits, until they stood outside a purple and blue tent. It didn’t have hearts, spark chambers, fuel pumps, or even those tentacle things hanging on it, just one big, sorta creepy baleful eye.

“Come!” the creature pulled him inside, and, despite himself, Drift patted for his cred chit. Still there. And he couldn’t see anything inside the tent that looked even remotely souvenir-y (souvenir-ish?), nothing but a big table draped in black fabric and a big crystal orb on top, and a smell like old burning perfume in the air.

“Come come come sit,” the creature said, letting go of him at last, while four of the five arms pointed at a chair. Well, you can’t go against what four out of five arms want, can you? Puzzled, Drift slipped into the chair, swinging the Great Sword to one side so that it angled over his other shoulder, as the creature scuttled around, hopping on some sort of stool, two of the three feet gripping the table. “Have message for you.” It leaned closer, and for the first time, Drift noticed it had only one eye, big and huge and in the middle of its face, and when it blinked, it was like, well, half a face moving. Weird. Well, it solved the mystery of the Big Creepy Eye decoration outside? Come to Big Creepy Eye!

Wow, Drift. Pull yourself together. This was probably just some scam, like they had in the old days. Grab some rich-looking sucker, spew enough vaguely precise details (you have a friend whose name as a vowel in it), and part sucker from cash. Or worse, but Drift didn’t think they had syphoners all the way out here, despite the cardboard spark chamber decorations.

Big Creepy Eye was staring at him with...yeah. That. Waiting for an answer. “Yeah?” Drift tried to sound like ‘oh, you and everyone else’.

“You lost someone, yes?”

Right. Who hasn’t? This was the game, how it was played. So play it cool, Drift. You’re not gonna get taken. You’re no sucker. “Lost a lot of someones. Gonna have to be more specific.” HA! Maybe he could turn this around entirely!

“He like go fast.” Oh come on, Drift thought, thinking about the tires on his shoulders. That’s not even trying!

“Still too vague.”

“He...fly?” The eye tilted upward, just like the voice. Big Creepy Eye sucked at this, Drift thought. It sounded like he was totally guessing. Which he was--he had to be!--but the point was he wasn’t supposed to sound like it!

“Maybe,” Drift said.

“No, no. He fly. I see now.” Big Creepy Eye sure had a way of making the verb ‘see’ into something freaky. As if the flappy arms thing he was doing didn’t seem freaky enough.

“Yeah, okay.” That was a little weird, but maybe he was doubling down. Drift had said ‘maybe’, after all. Still, it was making him a teensy bit uncomfortable. Especially when he thought about how hard Ratchet would laugh at him about even halfway thinking about going along with this. “Look. I don’t have a lot of time,” he began, pressing his palms on the table to rise.

Two hands apiece came down onto Drift’s and the fifth hand arched over Creepy’s head like a scorpion tail, wagging in Drift’s face. “You stay and listen to message. He come long way.”

“So have I,” Drift said, but the bluster was paper-flimsy, even in his own audio. Really, if someone wanted to give him a message, surely they could have found someone with a functioning translator?

“Drift?”

Drift’s optics snapped up, because the voice...that wasn’t Creepy’s voice. The name ‘Wing’ was in the back of his throat, a hard lump of emotion and sound. He forced the “Yes,” past the lump, and it came out chalky and soft.

“It’s me. Wing.” Drift nodded, and the lump in his throat seemed to fizz and dissolve, as if released. “I’ve been watching you, Drift.”

Well, those were never good words to hear, and Drift felt himself start to crumple. “Made a mess of things.” Back with Gigatron, Overlord, the Lost Light, the Wreckers, Perceptor...the list could go on and on but it was already depressing enough: suddenly his life seemed a long chain of misshapen failures, all the way back to Theophany. “I’m no good at being good.” Hey, stupid, his brain module howled, you’re getting conned! This is just Creepy having, I don’t know, a really good memory and link to the Autopedia or something. This isn’t real.

But how’d he know what Wing’s voice would sound like?

“Everything you’ve done has been from an honorable spark,” Wing--or Creepy Eye--said. It was Wing’s earnesty, if nothing else. The voice softened. “To be a light in a world of darkness is sometimes to feel dim.”

Yeah, dim sure was the word. Drift couldn’t help the droop of his spaulders. Half for the truth of it, and half for the notion that if he was falling for an elaborate con, dim was just the beginning of the words he’d apply to himself. He wanted to believe, so badly, but he knew that wanting to believe didn’t make anything so. “I don’t know what I’m doing.” Here, or back with Gigatron or...any of it, really.

“Following your path, Drift.”

“Kind of a wobbly path.” Understatement of the war, really.

“Those with the straightest paths lead to the smallest goals, Drift.”

He sighed. “I just want one goal.” Something he could do, other than getting buffeted around by fate. He knew know--oh, he’d known it then, really--that scouring the rim of the galaxy for Decepticon holdouts had been busywork, at best. Something to do, something to keep his body busy.

“You have one. But you won’t know what it is until the end.”

Oh that was helpful. And the voice of doubt turned its volume up a little louder, because he didn’t want evasion. He didn’t want to swap his confusion for a more mystical version of confusion. But Wing--maybe Wing--continued. “I didn’t know mine, until you spoke in front of Dai Atlas after he’d struck you, asking us to make a stand, a few to give themselves to save the others.”

N-no one knew that. Dai Atlas might have, but Dai Atlas was dead. That definitely wasn’t in any of the Autobot records. He’d never even told Perceptor that. The voice of doubt shattered into dust. “You knew?”

“I knew. And I chose. In the big moments, Drift, fate allows us to choose. It’s only in the small that we feel swept along.”

Drift could feel his optics sting, and this time he didn’t even think of blaming Creepy Eye and his weird incense. “Will I ever see you again?” That felt, suddenly, like the only question worth asking.

“You will,” Wing said. “That’s another choice fate gave me: to wait for you before moving on.”

“But I--” He got Wing killed. No matter how he tried to think of it, it was all his fault. Stupid, slag-headed, selfish Deadlock, the mech he’d been running from every since.

“You gave me my destiny, Drift. Did you never think of it like that? Both of us just...muddling along until we met. And then.” And then, like a chemical that burned brighter and brighter, till it blinded Drift in the light of Theophany’s suns. He had never thought of it like that.

“But I will meet you...then. Till then, you have living to do, Drift.”

He didn’t want to, and he felt a sour sulkiness rise in him.

“Don’t scowl like that,” Wing said, but the voice was tender, affectionate. “You have those who love you.”

Not many, he thought. But, suddenly, enough. He’d never be like Rodimus, with a host of fans and admirers, and no one could be like Thunderclash, but he had Ratchet and...and maybe Perceptor, still…. “None of them are you.”

“They don’t have to be. Your spark, like your path, is bigger than just one mech, Drift.”

It didn’t feel very big. It felt--as always--small compared to Wing.

“You are a light, Drift,” and Drift could feel a sudden warmth against his chassis, a fuzzy, plush tingle, like another mech’s EM field against his. “And one light can kindle many, many others.”

Like you did me, Drift thought, but he couldn’t get the words out. He nodded, and the warmth seemed to fill him, an inner lightness and weightlessness lifting up his spark. He nodded--it was all he could manage to do, folding his hands around his chassis, hugging the warmth to him, and everything seemed to have a golden glow to it, like seeing the world through gold optics.

Big Creepy Eye was face down--eye down--on the table, limbs splayed out like a squashed bug. Uh. That didn’t look good. Drift stood, carefully, reaching over to prod one shoulder gently with a finger.

“WHAAUGHGUUUGHGHGHBUUUGGGHN!” Creepy shouted, all hands and two of the feet flailing in some kind of kung fu looking thing, the stool clattering to the floor behind it. The hands lowered, and one of the feet. “You get nothing from me!.” The final foot pointed accusingly at him, making a flexy gesture that made it clear Creepy Eye would have no problem slapping him silly with it.

“I. Uh. Was just going?” Other than the remnant of warmth around his spark, he was pretty sure his business here was done. “Don’t I..owe you money?” That is how it worked, right?

The foot wavered. “You worst burglar ever.”

That’s because I’m not a burglar, Drift thought, but the thought was immediately followed by another--Big Creepy Eye had been trying to rook him, and what happened had been just as much of a surprise to him as Drift. “Yeah,” Drift said. “I’ll work on it, then.”

The foot came back up, two hands over Creepy’s head like a praying mantis. “You work on it somewhere else!”

Drift was pretty sure the spindly limbs, even if Creepy had some sort of Helicopter of Fists attack, wouldn’t do that much against his armor. Still, the message was clear. Clear out. He nodded, and ducked back into the street.

He stopped, halfway back to the ship. He didn’t have anything for Ratchet, he thought. But then again, he said, feeling that warmth around his spark ripple inside him, maybe he did.


End file.
